Category Archives: Random Blogging

Those Commie Girl Scouts…

Yesterday, the media was filled with reports about Indiana Representative Bob Morris, who refused to sign a legislative resolution recognizing the 100th anniversary of the founding of Girl Scouts of America.

In case you missed it, the Associated Press report read in part as follows:

“… Morris said he found online allegations that the Girl Scouts are a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood, encourage sex and allow transgender females to join. He also wrote that the fact that first lady Michelle Obama is honorary president should give lawmakers pause before they endorse the Girl Scouts.”

Morris went on to say that Girl Scouts were being taught to be “feminists, lesbians and Communists.”

I’m going to resist the temptation to deconstruct this, or to note that using the terms feminist and lesbian to mean undesirable or unAmerican is itself unAmerican.

Instead, I want to talk about mental illness–as in genuine psychoses, not as in a snarky label to be thrown at someone with whom we disagree.

I know that we Americans have been going through some rough times. We’ve been involved in two unsettling, seemingly endless wars. The economy tanked, and people get more than a little destabilized in times of economic stress. There are unpredictable terrorist attacks around the world, and unthinkable as it is, some of those are right here in the USA. The pace of social and sexual and technological change continues to accelerate. If you are an older white guy (and this does seem to be the cohort most affected although it certainly isn’t the only one), you are trying to make sense of a world in which your wife is no longer submissive and dependent. Your unmarried daughter may be living with some guy–or worse (at least in your worldview) with another woman. There’s a black guy in the White House and a neighbor speaking Spanish. Your television showcases very different “lifestyles” from those you approve. Your grandchildren are playing with strange handheld devices, listening to rap music on their IPods, and texting their friends. It goes on and on.

It’s understandable that people who lack adequate resources to cope with stress and dramatic social change would be confused and even angry at finding themselves in such a strange new world. But a not-insignificant number of them have gone well beyond resentment and anger; they have responded by literally disconnecting from reality. And on Fox News, or the brave new world of the internet, it’s easy to find validation from someone who shares their worst fears and fantasies.

So Rep. Morris burrows into his conspiracy theories about Girl Scouts. Rick Santorum accuses Protestants who fail to share his religious zealotry of “leaving Christianity” and criticizes President Obama not for specific policies but for following a “false theology.” Republican Senators–men in powerful positions–find themselves pandering to a political base that rejects science and reason, demonizes the U.S. President and First Lady, and is terrified of the “socialists” who are conspiring to destroy the country by providing universal access to health care and raising the top marginal tax rate.

There are all sorts of websites and organizations trying to counter some of the more outrageous fantasies with logic and facts. The problem is, as a friend used to say, you can’t reason someone out of a position he didn’t reason himself into. Someone who believes that Adam saddled up his trusty dinosaur will not be amenable to learning about the science of global climate change. Someone who believes that God doesn’t want women to control their own bodies–who believes, like Rick Santorum, that contraception is morally wrong because it divorces sexuality from procreation, and allows people to do “wrong things”–is unlikely to read the research about the benefits of birth control or the dangers of overpopulation. Someone who believes that marriage has “always” been between one man and one woman, despite ample evidence to the contrary  (plural marriage, for example, remains legal in 50 countries right now) is simply not going to look at the evidence and support same-sex unions.

Withdrawal from reality–an insistent belief in things that are demonstrably untrue (think “death panels” and United Nations black helicopters and “Agenda 21”) is a sign of paranoia. I don’t know what psychiatrists call an irrational antipathy to people who are in some way different–gay people, immigrants, etc.–but as my mother would have put it, “a wellness it isn’t.”

The Girl Scouts aren’t learning to be lesbian communists. Sane people know that.

Barack Obama is not a Muslim Socialist who was born in Kenya. Sane people know that.

Teenagers will not become gay because the Indiana Youth Group gets to put a message on Indiana license plates. Sane people know that.

The Earth is more than 6000 years old and climate change is a fact. Sane people know that.

We need to do something about the not-sane people. But I don’t know what.

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Translating Anecdote into Data

There’s an old academic adage that reminds researchers “the plural of anecdote is not data.” It’s a worthwhile caution against drawing too broad a conclusion from one or two examples.

This caution came to mind last night at my grandson’s tenth birthday party . (This was the one for family–I am very grateful that my son and daughter-in-law separate the wild kid’s celebration from the more staid event for grandparents and aunts and uncles.) My brother-in-law said something about “those Republicans” in a way that made it clear he did not consider himself to be one of them. This from the person who is easily the most conservative member of our family.

Nor is ours a family that was considered “liberal” until relatively recently. My husband and I met when we served in a Republican Administration; my sister and brother-in-law were active Republicans (my sister was one of those good citizens who polled her neighborhood for the precinct committee person). Our daughter used to work for a group called Republicans for Choice (yes, Virginia, there really were pro-choice Republicans once upon a time); she now works for a group called Democrats for Education Reform.

Little by little, as the GOP became more and more extreme, more inhospitable to science, diversity and modernity, we left.

This is one family, one anecdote.

I wonder how widespread our experience is, and whether there’s any data to confirm a wider exodus.

Anyone know?

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Remembrance of Things Past

The Republican candidates for President continue to appeal to the current GOP base with what passes for policy in the party these days: Romney has just promised to cut funding for the arts by half; Santorum promises not just a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, but also to retroactively “annul” those marriages that have already occurred (good luck with that, Rick); Gingrich wants poor children with no “role models” or a “work ethic” (i.e., black kids) to clean public school toilets, and Ron Paul wants the US to withdraw from contact from the rest of the world. They all pooh-pooh climate change and vow to reverse current measures to protect the environment. They all promise to control my uterus, and to charge me big bucks if I am impertinent enough to demand birth control. They all want to eviscerate labor unions and cut what’s left of the social safety net.

And none of them will ever, ever, ever raise taxes on rich folks. Promise.

I remember when the Republican Party didn’t resemble the Gong Show. I remember when Republicans were fiscally prudent adults who paid for the wars they waged, were pro-equality (okay, maybe not the southern ones), and were concerned about the health of the planet.

Young people to whom I defend the “old” GOP tend to be skeptical of my recollection, but I have proof of a sort. The other day, cleaning out some files, I came across a summary of the national Republican Platform of 1956. To today’s GOP, it would read like the Communist Manifesto.

A sampling:

  • We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs–expansion of social security–broadened coverage in unemployment insurance–improved housing–and better health protection for all our people.
  • We favor a comprehensive study of the effects upon wildlife of the drainage of our wetlands.
  • We recognize the need for maintaining isolated wilderness areas.
  • We favor a continuously vigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws.
  • We must continue and further perfect…programs of assistance to the millions of workers with special employment problems, such as older workers, handicapped workers, members of minority groups, and migratory workers.
  • We must extend the protection of the Federal minimum wage laws to as many more workers as is possible and practicable.
  • We must continue to fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry or sex.
  • We must revise and improve the Taft-Hartley Act so as to protect more effectively the rights of labor unions, management, the individual worker and the public.

I miss that party. RIP.

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Settling Scores and Legislating Badly

To this day, despite my aging memory, I can still vividly recall my law school Income Tax class–and not just because it was taught by the legendary Larry Jegen. The class was my first introduction to the phenomenon of laws like the one Jegen called “the crazy cousin rule.” This otherwise inexplicable provision, written in the appropriately impenetrable language of the tax code, allowed a tax deduction for any support rendered to certain relatives in mental institutions. Presumably, the author of the measure had such a relative, and he was using his elective position to write tax laws that would benefit him personally, by allowing him to recoup some of the costs involved. Public policy had nothing to do with it.

Which brings me to Mike Delph and his attempt to abolish the use of Grand Juries in Indiana.

As faithful readers of this blog (there are some, right?) will recall, I blogged about this odd proposal a while back, expressing my puzzlement. A more savvy observer of the political scene posted a comment, suggesting a motive for this seemingly bizarre effort: Delph, he said, was a friend of Charlie White, the Indiana Secretary of State who had been indicted by a grand jury on charges of theft and vote fraud.

That seemed petty and irrational even for Mike Delph, but an article about Charlie White’s upcoming trial in this morning’s Indianapolis Star has leant support to that explanation. In the lengthy background piece, Delph is quoted at several points about his friendship with White, and his conviction (no pun intended) that the charges were politically motivated. According to Delph, he and Charlie often pray together in Charlie’s office.

Now it all makes sense. A grand jury indicted his friend. Abolish grand juries.

It needn’t stop there. If your friend is mistakenly arrested by the police, abolish the police; if a doctor’s treatment harms your friend, abolish the practice of medicine….

I don’t know the content of those devotions in Charlie’s office, but may I suggest adding a prayer for less grandiosity and more common sense?

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